NEW FINE FOR META IN THE EUROPEAN UNION
The imperative need to comply with the rules and protect user data.
Once again, Mr. Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, faces problems with European regulatory authorities regarding Facebook/Meta. Although we have already witnessed his appearances before these authorities in previous years, which have not been particularly successful or friendly, the European Union, through the competent bodies, has struck hard against the company for ignoring existing provisions. For Europeans, the issue of user data protection is not considered a minor violation of the rules. And, based on past records, it could not be stated with absolute certainty that Zuckerberg is, in fact, a man strictly concerned with these details. One only needs to remember episodes like Cambridge Analytica, which we recall in a frame at the end of this post for those who may not remember. These episodes—direct manipulation of data and people—cost the company a fortune in fines in the United States and the United Kingdom for alleged manipulation of wills in favor of Brexit (Britain’s exit from the European Union).
Now, the European Union has imposed a record fine of 1.2 billion euros on Meta, the owner of Facebook, for transferring data of European citizens to the United States, as announced by the Irish Data Protection Commission, the agency responsible for overseeing privacy regulations compliance in the EU.
The European data protection body believes that Facebook has illegally stored European citizens’ data for years on its U.S. servers. The fine is a European record in terms of privacy, surpassing the 746 million euros penalty imposed on Amazon in 2021. Additionally, the European Union gives Meta a five-month deadline to stop sending European user data to the United States and six months to delete any personal information previously transferred.
In March 2022, the European Union and the United States reached an agreement on the principles of a new framework to ensure the free transfer of personal data between the two blocs, as publicly announced by U.S. President Joseph Biden and European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen. The transfer framework was suspended in 2020 when the Court of Justice of the European Union annulled the existing agreement, ruling that the U.S. did not guarantee the privacy of European citizens’ data.
The Irish body believes that the contractual clauses Meta uses to transfer data to the U.S. “do not address the risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms” of European Facebook users raised by this ruling.
The agreement between both blocs has not yet come into effect. Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of Global Affairs, urged the new framework to be implemented. “I’m frustrated to see that the announced agreement has not been put into action,” he said. “We need to ensure that data flow.”
The sanction increases the pressure on the U.S. government to finalize the agreement that would allow thousands of multinational companies to continue sending European user data to the United States. The final agreement could be ready as early as July, though it could be delayed until autumn.
Meta has even threatened to exit its operations in the European Union (by the way, threats are one of Meta’s preferred tools) if both blocs do not reach an agreement to allow data transfer. The previous framework was annulled by European courts after a complaint against Facebook was filed by Austrian Max Schrems, who sought to prevent the transfer of European citizens’ data to the U.S. because U.S. laws do not provide the same level of protection as European data protection regulations.
The American company has stated that it will appeal both the ruling and the fine imposed, and will request the suspension of the order before the courts. It also pointed out that there will be no immediate interruption of Facebook in Europe.
In a statement signed by Nick Clegg (an interesting figure, by the way; Mr. Zuckerberg spares no expense), the company says that it has used the contractual clauses with the conviction that this legal instrument met the requirements of the European data protection regulation. “We will appeal and request the courts suspend the application deadlines, given the harm that these orders would cause, including to the millions of people who use Facebook every day.”
As is typical, this is a daily issue—the protection of user data rights and ownership—so we will need to stay tuned for the next chapter, even though for Meta/Facebook, the situation doesn’t seem ideal in this particular case.
| Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica Case: In the 2010s, the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica collected data from millions of Facebook users without their consent, mainly for use in political propaganda. The data was obtained through an app called This Is Your Digital Life, developed by computer scientist Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research in 2013. The app consisted of a series of questions to create psychological profiles of users, and it gathered personal data from the contacts of its users via Facebook’s Open Graph platform. The app collected data from up to 87 million Facebook profiles, and Cambridge Analytica used this data to provide analytical support to the campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump for the 2016 presidential elections. Cambridge Analytica was also accused of interfering in the Brexit referendum, although the official investigation acknowledged that the company did not intervene “beyond certain initial inquiries” and that there were no “significant breaches.” Information about the misuse of data came to light thanks to Christopher Wylie, a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, in interviews with The Guardian and The New York Times. In response, Facebook apologized for its role in data collection, and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, had to testify before the United States Congress. In July 2019, it was announced that the Federal Trade Commission imposed a $5 billion fine on Facebook for its privacy violations. In October 2019, Facebook agreed to pay a £500,000 fine to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office for exposing its users’ data to a “serious risk of harm.” In May 2018, Cambridge Analytica declared bankruptcy in the U.S. Other advertising agencies had been implementing various forms of psychological tracking for years, and Facebook patented similar technology in 2012. However, Cambridge Analytica’s transparency about its methods and the caliber of its clients—such as Trump’s presidential campaign and the pro-Brexit campaign—raised public awareness of the issues posed by psychological tracking, a concern that scholars had been warning about for years. The scandal sparked growing public interest in privacy and the influence of social media on politics. The hashtag #DeleteFacebook trended on Twitter. |
[i] Sir Nicholas William Peter Clegg, known as Nick Clegg, is a British socioliberal politician. At 32, he was elected as a Member of the European Parliament, an institution he served in until 2004. From the 2005 to 2017 general elections in the United Kingdom, he represented the Sheffield Hallam constituency in the UK Parliament. Early in his parliamentary career, he served as his party’s Home Affairs Spokesperson. Just two years after entering the House of Commons, he was elected Leader of the Liberal Democrats.
Clegg led his party in the 2010 UK general elections, in which no party achieved an absolute majority in the House of Commons. Due to this situation, the Conservative Party led by David Cameron formed a coalition government with the Liberals, and Clegg was appointed Deputy Prime Minister of the UK on May 11, 2010, the second most important title in the UK government. After the 2015 UK general elections, Clegg resigned as leader of his party, and as a result of the Conservative victory in those elections, he ceased to hold the position of Deputy Prime Minister.
On October 19, 2018, Clegg was appointed Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications at Facebook in Palo Alto after the company’s stock value dropped by 15% in 2018. He began his role in January 2019.
In May 2018, Clegg joined David Miliband and Nicky Morgan in calling for a soft Brexit. On June 23, 2018, Clegg participated in the march organized by People’s Vote in London to commemorate the second anniversary of the referendum to leave the European Union. People’s Vote is a group that called for a public vote on the final Brexit deal between the UK and the EU. In October 2018, it was announced that Clegg had been hired as the official public relations head in his role as Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications at Facebook, replacing Elliot Schrage. His annual salary is 4.5 million euros, which is sixty times what he earned as an MP.